~ Exploring the Age of Consequences

Monthly Archives: August 2014

“The agrarian population among us is growing, and by no means is it made up merely of some farmers and some country people. It includes urban gardeners, urban consumers who are buying food from local farmers, organizers of local food economies, consumers who have grown doubtful of the healthfulness, the trustworthiness, and the dependability of the corporate food system – people who understand what it means to be landless.” – Wendell Berry

A few years ago, I traveled up New York’s Hudson Valley to visit a young leader of the emerging agrarian movement with the aristocratic-sounding name of Severine von Tscharner Fleming. I had met Severine a few times before and I knew her to be an energetic and successful advocate for young farmers like herself. For starters, in 2007 she founded The Greenhorns, a nonprofit which has become an influential grassroots network dedicated to recruiting and supporting young farmers and ranchers. Like its director, it is not a shy organization.

“America needs more young farmers and more young farmers want a piece of America,” is how the Greenhorns web site describes its mission. This didn’t simply mean access to a piece of land either, though that’s a huge issue for young farmers today.

“The young farmer movement looks and sounds romantic, and it is,” Severine said. “It also is ridiculously difficult to break into farming these days. And it is critical that we do so. People who take on this challenge are highly tenacious, ambitious, inventive, and also either stubborn or a little nuts.”

It isn’t just Severine’s goals that are impressive, but also the variety of means by which she accomplishes them. She calls it “avant-garde programming” and it includes videos, podcasts, e-books, and web content, naturally enough, but it also includes workshops, social mixers, barn dances, art projects, and a full-length documentary, all done in a bouncy style that can only be described as “farm-hipster.”

If Greenhorns wasn’t enough, Severine also co-founded the National Young Farmers Coalition, manages a weekly radio show on Heritage Radio Network, writes a popular blog, speaks at countless conferences, organizes endlessly via the Web, and helps with something called the Seed Circus, which puts on educational events for young farmers all around the country. And she’s assisting the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, located just over the Massachusetts state line, with an initiative called The Agrarian Trust, which aims to help young farmers gain access to land. And she was editor-in-chief of the 2013 New Farmers Almanac,and she has built an 8,000-volume agricultural library, and she’s active at her local Grange hall.

The underlying theory of her advocacy work is that many more people would choose to farm if they knew how to get started. She also wants young farmers to understand that it’s possible to have a social life and a viable business at the same time, and once they’ve begun farming, to make sure there’s a network of support to help them get access to the resources and information they need to stay in business.

“Basically, if the young farmer makes it beyond the third year and still loves it,” she said, “they’ll likely stay a farmer for life. Which is of course what our country desperately needs. USDA says it wants to bring on 100,000 new farmers in the next five years. It’s a big project, and yes I think art, culture, free beer, delicious food, hot sexy farmer men, and sweaty dancing are appropriate recruitment tools, far more effective, in the long run, than government-issued propaganda.”

Severine says young people are inspired to get into farming for both political and environmental reasons. It starts typically with a journey through apprenticeships and internships as each young farmer discovers which aspects of the farming life he or she wishes to pursue, followed by a bunch of hard work to gain proficiency in, say, carpentry, horse wrangling, or irrigation system maintenance, without going into debt, and usually before starting a family.

Who are these young farmers? According to Severine, most are from cities and suburbs – thus the “greenhorn” moniker – and many come from the social justice or food poverty movements. Another portal is the Food Corps, which is project of AmeriCorps and places young people in food-oriented jobs, often building school gardens. Many young farmers attended farm camps when they were kids or went on field trips to local farms through their elementary schools. A few participated in 4-H, though not as many as one might think, she said. The educational backgrounds of young farmers today varies widely, including engineering, public health, computer science, literature, anthropology and earth science, but the decision to go into farming after examining all the options is the same: to live a life with dignity and purpose and have a positive impact on the community.

“We’ll seize opportunities to buy inexpensive battered pastures and compacted soils,” she said, “and then heal those lands using good land stewardship techniques. We’ll reclaim territory from commodity crops, and try our best not to churn or ruin our own soils while we build up enough capital to stop roto-tilling. We’ll process our own darn chickens and build our own darn websites. We are just as stubborn and innovative as farmers have always been.”

According to the USDA Agricultural Census, the number of young people farming in the U.S. is on the rise. Though it is still a minority of the tiny minority of Americans who are farmers, it reinforces the argument that a movement is growing.

“Big things start small and those of us in this new farmers’ movement are still running small or medium-sized operations, gaining experience and knowledge and aching to scale up,” she said. “We could do more with just a little help, a special chance on a piece of land, a great deal on equipment, babysitting, help with accounting, a graphic design tip, or low cost advice from an attorney. We will continue to need mentorship and guidance, and the occasional kick in the pants. It will be hard, but it will not be boring. Don’t forget that we may need a pep talk every now and again.”

Here’s a photo of Severine:

The name of this movement is New Agrarianism.

In Latin, agrarian means “pertaining to land.” My dictionary defines it as relating to fields and their tenure or to farmers and their way of life. Wendell broadens this definition, calling it a way of thought based on land – a set of practices and attitudes, a loyalty and a passion. It is simultaneously a culture and an economy, he says, both of which are inescapably local – local nature and local people combined into “a practical and enduring harmony.”

The antithesis of agrarianism is industrialism, which Wendell says is a way of thought based on capital and technology, not nature. Industrialism is an economy first and foremost, and if it has any culture it is “an accidental by-product of the ubiquitous effort to sell unnecessary products for more than they are worth.”

An agrarian economy, in contrast, rises up from the soils, fields, woods, streams, rangelands, hills, mountains, backyards, and rooftops. It embraces the coexistences and interrelationships that form the heart of resilient local communities and local watersheds. It fits the farming to the farm and the forestry to the forest, to which I would include the meander to the stream and the carbon to the carbon cycle. For Wendell, the agrarian mind is not regional, national, or global, but local. It must know intimately the local plants and animals and local soils; it must know local possibilities and impossibilities. It insists that we should not begin work until we have looked and seen where we are; it knows that nature is the “pattern-maker for the human use of the earth,” as he describes it, and that we should honor nature not only as our mother, but as our teacher and judge.

I first ran across the term new agrarianism in 2003 in a book of essays on the topic collected and edited by Eric Freyfogle, a law professor at the University of Illinois. The term resonated with me because it described exactly what I was seeing as I traveled around. In fact, I could have used Freyfogle’s own words from his essay, “A Durable Scale” to describe my experience.

“Within the conservation movement,” he wrote, “the New Agrarianism offers useful guiding images of humans living and working on land in ways that can last. In related reform movements, it can supply ideas to help rebuild communities and foster greater virtue. In all settings, agrarian practices can stimulate hope for more joyful living, healthier families, and more contented, centered lives.”

Words, I’m afraid, that didn’t impress my colleagues in the conservation movement at the time. Nevertheless, in his essay Freyfogle produced a list of New Agrarians that was spot on:

The community-supported agriculture group that links local food buyers and food growers into a partnership, one that sustains farmers economically, promotes ecologically sound farm practices, and gives city dwellers a known source of wholesome food.

The woodlot owner who develops a sustainable harvesting plan for his timber, aiding the local economy while maintaining a biologically diverse forest.

The citizen-led, locally based watershed restoration effort that promotes land uses consistent with a river’s overall health and beauty.

The individual family, rural or suburban, that meets its food needs largely through gardens and orchards, on its own land or on shared neighborhood plots, attempting always to aid wildlife and enhance the soil.

The farmer who radically reduces a farm’s chemical use, cuts back subsurface drainage, diversifies crops and rotations, and carefully tailors farm practices to suit the land.

The family – urban, suburban, or rural – that embraces new modes of living to reduce its overall consumption, to integrate its work and leisure in harmonious ways, and to add substance to its ties with neighbors.

The artist who helps residents connect aesthetically to surrounding lands.

The faith-driven religious group that takes seriously, in practical ways, its duty to nourish and care for its natural inheritance.

The motivated citizens everywhere who, alone and in concert, work to build stable, sustainable urban neighborhoods; to repair blighted ditches; to stimulate government practices that conserve lands and enhance lives; and in dozens of other ways to translate agrarian values into daily life.

To this list I could add only:

The carbon farmer or rancher who explores and shares strategies that sequester CO2 in soils and plants, reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and produces co-benefits that build ecological and economic resilience in local landscapes.

Freyfogle shares Wendell Berry’s belief that agrarianism is the proper countervailing force to industrialism and its surfeit of sins, including water pollution, soil loss, resource consumption, and the radical disruption of plant and wildlife populations. Freyfogle goes on to add broader anxieties: the declining sense of community; the separation of work and leisure; the shoddiness of mass-produced goods; the decline of the household economy; the alienation of children from the natural world; the fragmentation of neighborhoods and communities; and a gnawing dissatisfaction with core aspects of our modern culture, particularly the hedonistic, self-centered values and perspectives that control so much of our lives now.

In contrast to these negative attributes of modern life, the new agrarianism is first and foremost about living a life of positive energy and joy, says Freyfogle. Nature is the foundation of this joy, but so are the skills necessary to live a life. At its best the agrarian life is an integrated whole, with work and leisure mixed together, undertaken under healthful conditions and surrounded by family.

“When all the pieces of the agrarian life come together,” Freyfogle wrote, “nutrition and health, beauty, leisure, manners and morals, satisfying labor, economic security, family and neighbors, and a spiritual peacefulness – we have what agrarians define as the good life.”

It is to this definition of the good life to Severine and the other new agrarians strive.

One ancient practice nearly wiped out in the United States by “progress” was the widespread use of animal power in many important endeavors, including farming, hauling, logging, herding and various types of transportation. In the late nineteenth century, for example, getting around in New York City meant employing at least one of the nearly 200,000 horses stabled in the city (whose manure production posed a serious and perennial public health hazard). Equally hard to imagine today is the knowledge that until the adoption of tractors in the1920s, nearly all American agriculture was powered by livestock!

As someone who came of age among the asphalt suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona during the 1970s—the nadir years for animal power in the U.S.—these historical facts were hard to comprehend when I first heard them. Although I had spent my youth around horses, they were strictly the recreational variety. I knew nothing about draft animals or horse farming, except that they had become an anachronism, replaced forever by petroleum, or so I assumed. Therefore, it came as a surprise in the 1990s to learn that animal power was making a comeback, draft horses in particular, propelled by rising concerns about carbon pollution and oil scarcity. Cool!

But what exactly was animal power?

I decided to find out. In early July a few years ago, I traveled to the heart of Amish country in central Ohio to attend an annual event called Horse Progress Days, which is partly a celebration of horse farming and partly a convention of farmers intending to witness the latest in animal-powered “technology”—a word that must be used judiciously, given the famous Amish disdain for gadgetry. The most educational part of my trip, however, happened on the evening of my arrival.

Standing at the second-story railing of my hotel, I watched an Amish family bale and load hay in an adjacent field. The hay had been cut a day or two earlier to dry and now needed to be “put up” before the leaden sky began to drizzle. There was a calm, methodical urgency to the family’s work. The apparent patriarch of the family, wearing the standard Amish uniform of straw hat, plain shirt, suspenders and black pants, stood in a hay baler that was so old it looked like it belonged in a history museum. It sounded old, too. Its single-stroke engine, whose job was to compress the loose hay into a square bale and bind it with string, sputtered and choked so noisily that I expected it to give up and die at any moment.

The baler kept going, however, pulled by a team of handsome black draft horses that I later learned were Percherons. Together they spiraled steadily toward the center of the field, the baler excreting—for that’s what it looked like—a tidy, green bale of hay every thirty seconds or so. Not far behind followed another team of horses, guided by a young Amish man, likely a son or son-in-law, who stood on a flatbed wagon. On the ground were three young women, in plain dresses and white bonnets, who loaded the wagon with the freshly minted bales. The work must have been pleasurable because I heard the sounds of laughter from where I stood. When they filled the wagon, the youngsters drove it to a farm across the busy road, returning a short while later to continue their rounds.

In less than an hour, their work was done. The field had been completely emptied of hay, looking like a shorn sheep, bewildered and turned back to pasture.

I was sort of bewildered too. That didn’t look so hard to do, I thought. My mood changed to astonishment a short time later, however, when I heard the sound of another engine fire up. This was not the sound of a coughing relic, however; it had the confident hum of serious machinery. Indeed, it belonged to a John Deere combine of some sort (I knew as much about farm machinery back then as I did about draft horses). Within a minute or two it began sweeping across a neighboring hay field of approximately the same size as the Amish field, chased almost comically by a tractor pulling a large bin on wheels. The combine sucked up the loose hay from the ground and then spit it—for that’s what it looked like—through a long pipe into the careening bin beside it. Idling nearby, with their lights on and engines running, were three more tractors with bins, waiting patiently for their turn.

In about half the time it took the Amish family to bale and load their hay, the combine had finished its work. All four bins had been filled and the tractors dutifully dispatched someplace over the horizon with their green cargo. The combine, too, took off down the road for parts unknown.

And suddenly all was quiet.

What had just happened? Two fields of similar size had just been cleared of hay—one principally by horses, the other by horsepower. I wondered: how many gallons of precious diesel had the ancient, coughing baler used in comparison to the purring combine and speedy tractors? The difference must have been huge. And where did all that industrially gathered hay go? How many miles down the road would it travel to its ultimate destination? I had no idea, but I knew exactly where the Amish hay went—across the road, to be used, I’m sure, to feed the farm’s dairy cows in the coming winter. The contrasting images bounced around in my mind as I soaked up the silence.

Years later, the contrast has only sharpened.

Animal power, of course, isn’t just for the Amish. It’s being implemented across the nation, especially among young people. Concerns about carbon pollution and our dependence on petroleum have only grown since 2008, making draft horses, oxen and other livestock increasingly attractive power sources. There are pros and cons to using animals in agriculture (especially for the major no-no of tilling), but I suspect the final decision may come down to whether you are an “animal person” at heart or not. I love horses, so the appeal for me is direct. But I also know from experience about the cost and labor involved in keeping animals, especially big ones.

Still, I’ll bet that draft animals will be part of any regenerative economic system we develop to meet the expanding challenges of the twenty-first century.

Here’s a photo I took from Horse Progress Days:

The Low Stress Way

John Wayne must be rolling over in his grave.

This thought crossed my mind as I sat in the back row of a herding clinic taught by Guy Glosson, Tim McGaffic and Steve Allen, ranchers and trainers who practice a type of low-stress livestock handling that emphasizes patience and kindness toward animals. Stop the whooping and hollering when moving cattle, they said. No more electric prods, sticks or aggressive attitudes either. Throw away your conventional ideas of controlling animals by use of fear, pain or other forms of stress-inducing pressure.

“Consider not wearing sunglasses when approaching cattle,” said Glosson. “You’re the predator and they’re the prey, or at least that’s the way they look at it. If they can’t see your eyes, it may make them more nervous, as they may not be able to judge your intentions.”

I smiled to myself, imaging what the Duke would say to this. “Hell, you’re supposed to make them nervous,” the actor might exclaim. “What is this, some sort of New Age ranching?”

“If cattle get worried,” continued Glosson, “you’ve taken the first step toward losing control of the herd. Animals want to feel secure. But they won’t feel secure if you’re yelling at them all the time. Your job is to treat them with respect.”

I could hear the Duke groan. Yelling at cattle and prodding them into action was as old as, well, the movies. Older, actually—Tim opened the class with a history lesson about how livestock have been manhandled in the West since the Civil War. Stressing out cattle was part of ranching culture and is still standard practice on many ranches today. Perhaps that explains why Baxter Black, a famous cowboy poet and former large-animal veterinarian once challenged Glosson over the idea of low-stress handling with a simple, steely: “Why?”

“I told him that it’s all about the health of the animal,” Glosson said. “Consistently handling animals without scaring them allows trust to be formed. This trust helps animals remain calm and that equates into a healthier immune system and better response to vaccines and other medications they may need.”

“I also told him that it was less stress on the handler too, which made us healthier,” said Glosson, with his easy laugh. “But I don’t think I convinced him.”

Another reason to adopt the low-stress way is economics. The margin of profit on livestock for ranchers is literally counted in pennies per pound. The stress put on cattle as they move from the ranch to the feedlot or the slaughtering facility can “shrink” an animal’s weight as much as 15 percent. Stress can make an animal more susceptible to disease, often requiring additional medicines and additional costs. It can also affect pregnancy rates in cattle, the bread-and-butter of a rancher’s bottom line. It all adds up quickly in dollars and cents.

Another reason is a philosophical one: how we treat animals speaks volumes about who we are as human beings.

“For grazing animals like cattle, the most dangerous predator on earth is a young human male,” Glosson said. “Until trust is established, animals will always perceive humans as a threat. And we don’t want that. These animals are now domesticated and for the most part they depend on people for their every need. If we want them to perform at their best, they must not be afraid of the person caring for them.”

The low stress way starts with recognizing the predator-prey relationship and the effects of such things as noise, size, distance and motion on cattle, which, like many animals, have well-defined zones in which particular actions trigger particular responses. For example, the recognition zone is where the animal takes notice of you and tries to determine your intent. The flight zone, when crossed, will cause the animal to move away from your approach. Suddenly violating this zone means that you are likely to encounter an angry or panicked animal who has perceived you to be a threat.

According to Glosson, the key to successful low-stress handling is something called “pressure and release.” Your presence (as predator) creates pressure that an animal (as prey) wants to relieve. The critical moment occurs when you reduce the pressure instead of allowing the animal to do it for you by fleeing. You accomplish this by stepping into the animal’s flight zone in such a way as to pressure it in a direction or manner that you intend for it to move, and then backing off when the pressure is no longer needed—before the animal runs away from you. Worked with this way, animals learn from the release of pressure, not the pressure itself, and a mutual understanding is established.

The whole idea is to use a “law of nature” to positive effect. For example, Glosson teaches his students to approach animals on foot in a nonthreatening manner, often zig-zagging as they get closer. When an animal sends a signal, such as raising its head or widening its eyes, the student stops, or backs up. If the animal moves off, then the student is too close or has done something threatening. Glosson tells them to start over.

“You’re trying to start a conversation with the animal,” said Glosson. “You’re not trying to tell him you’re a nice guy or anything, because you’re not. You’re still the predator. Instead, you’re trying to communicate mutual respect. And you want to keep the conversation going as long as necessary to get the job done. And you need to let the animals know when the conversation is over.”

The modern concept of low-stress livestock management was developed by Bud Williams, a Canadian rancher who spent his entire life studying how to handle animals respectfully, swiftly and easily, including reindeer, elk, sheep and wild cattle. The key, he learned, was to pay attention to the instincts of the animal.

“We need people that are more sensitive to what the animal is asking us to do,” Williams told an interviewer. “If we would be more sensitive to that, then these jobs that we work on would be so much easier to do.”

It’s all about communication—and not just between man and animal, but between people, too. If you can’t communicate your ideas of what you’re doing, you probably also can’t get it accomplished.

“We always work at a level where we barely get it done,” Williams continued. “We get as good as we need to get. We’ve reached a point now where we need to get better.”